Can you be gentle with yourself?

“I can be very unkind to myself. It’s a habit I’ve had for a lot of years. I can take something that’s happened and not worked out and I chew it around in my own mind, and when I spit it out, it comes out with harsh words and criticisms.

“Other people can be unkind to me, too, but they don’t reach the heights of cruelty that I can manage. They don’t know what will hurt the most. Or perhaps they don’t aim to wound in quite the same way.”

Samantha (not her real name) is a client of mine. She’s very eloquent in how she describes how she treats herself, but she is not alone. So many of us practise variations of this.

But why do we do this? This life has many experiences, both welcome and hard, much of which we have little control over. So why would we try to make our experience harder?

In any moment, we can choose to be loving. That’s one of the wonderful things about being human. We can love. Other people, other beings, the world itself, and… ourselves. We get to choose to love or not to love. When we habitually choose not to love, all it does is make our experience harder.

Somehow we have got used to trying to ward off bad experiences by trying to improve ourselves. Which boils down to being vigilant in spotting our errors, and then efficient at chastising ourselves for them. But chastisements rarely result in improvement. They tend to create unhappiness, numbness or fear, which carries over into the next thing we try. Making it harder.

If a small child came to you and told you they had made a mistake, or got something wrong, how would you speak to them? Would you be encouraging, or would you tell them everything that was at fault in them? (Please tell me you’d be encouraging!)

Compassion towards ourselves isn’t impossible. It’s just that we have become conditioned to do the opposite, through how we learnt to do our humaning in the first place. Parents, school, peers, all had an impact on us, and we learnt through experience that we needed to be better.

Compassion opens us, frees us, brings light to our lived experience, making the tasks that we perform and the troubles that we endure that much easier. We can choose to be gentle or mean at any moment. We can offer ourselves encouragement instead of criticism. We can live in a moment coloured by compassion, rather than harshness.

I have always struggled to exercise. I’m not naturally good at sports, and this was drummed into me at school. So exercising as an adult carried a weight of impending failure about it. The experience turned around for me, however, when I realised that I could praise myself at the end of each session. So when I’ve completed my weights session, or cycled for my allotted time, I always say “Well done, you did it.” And it’s started to become easier, with that small thing. Because it isn’t, actually, a small thing. It gives me a flash of enjoyment, and a sense of satisfaction that I would not otherwise have. Without it, I would struggle through my exercise and there would be no reward at all. I realised, after a few months of this, that I was starting to feel the endorphins everyone talks about. Would I have got there without the attagirl? Maybe. Maybe not. So I’m going to keep doing it. It’s the compassionate thing to do.

I think we can transform our way of being by doing small things like this. And nobody need ever know (unless we decide to blog about it 🤷‍♀️.)

Harsh words from other people last as long as we hear them - either as they are being spoken, or as we repeat them to ourselves afterwards. We can carry them on, or we can bring compassion to our experience and let them go. If their words feel very persuasive, letting them go can be quite a challenge. But we can get there, by having the intention to be kind to ourselves, over and over and over again. This might seem like an effort, but that’s only because it may not be a habit yet. The habit we have formed of repeating criticism to ourselves uses up just as much energy, it’s just that we can do it automatically, without thinking, so it feels more ‘right’. But how is it right? Are you not a human, doing your best to navigate your humanness? Is it more right to treat yourself harshly, or well?